"Smashing Telly is a hand edited collection of the best free, instantly available TV on the web. Not 30 second clips (now with added clips, good ones) of a dog on a skateboard, or the millionth person to mime the Numa song, but classic clips and full length programs, with a focus on documentaries and non fiction. Smashing Television, not Gimmick Television.
Each entry is like a postcard, a short piece of text which describes a moving picture."
The premise of this 5 part documentary series is interesting in itself - breakaway states, but this episode is particularly relevant. It is about the Georgian breakaway states including South Ossetia. These are the Caucuses - where Caucasians, a ridiculous term that is racism by indirection, don’t come from. Unless you are Georgian, or a Georgian from a breakaway state that doesn’t want to be Georgian, that is. Confused? Stay tuned.
Paul Krugman writes that Iceland has just had to bail out a domestic bank for nearly a billion dollars, which on a per capita basis is a bigger bailout than the failed $700 billion mother of all bailouts. This piece by Max Keiser, a year ago, uses Iceland as a perfect example of the retarded-debt-craze-asset-bubble that has just bukkaked from a great height over the entire anglo-saxosphere and beyond.
The presenter, Max Keiser may be a nut case, a tabloid version of the higher brow economic Cassandra nut case, Nouriel Roubini. But in the land of the mad, Keiser is king, and we are currently in the land of the mad.
[Dear readers, I am very sorry if you are bored by all this financial stuff, which I assure you, I have absolutely no fucking clue about (just like people who work at investment banks, apparently). Unfortunately, I just can’t get enough of it. All those graphs and stats and doomsday scenarios and schadenfreude together - its like a disaster movie made specifically for slightly autistic, embittered beta-male, web nerds, like myself. Perhaps the economy is tanking because, like me, everyone is watching the economy tank rather than working.]
Plus Ca Change… professional New Yorker and androgynous person from the future, Laurie Anderson, talks about the problem of the national debt. Only this was nearly 20 years ago.
You would think that the problem of debt would be bigger now that: Asia is lending us money to pay the interest on the money it lent us to buy their mouse pads and umbrellas; capital markets have curled up into a nasty little tight spit-ball and the securities industry has shat the proverbial bed.
But as a percentage of GDP the numbers are far less scary according to the second graph here. So what’s the deal? Why aren’t the numbers worse, if the story is?
This first episode made in 2006 is from what could have been an extremely humdrum reality TV show about Wall Street. It may accidentally become a classic period piece, if the producers can embrace the irony as the series moves into its 3rd series, in a dramatically altered universe.
The original documentary has been taken down, however if you get a chance to see the original it is a ground breaking film about the biggest heroin dealer in Harlem in the 70s. The premise is that drug lord, Nicky Barnes was different in that he delivered a ‘good’ product and was professional.
This has been something that has been on my mind lately, I recently met someone who made his money from Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants, he was a personal friend of Colonel Sanders and said that what made him different was that he cared about the product.
When I worked at an Internet incubator as an ‘Entrepreneur in Residence’, we looked obsessively at how we would build a viral product, any viral product. In essence this seemed to be the moral equivalent of selling bad drugs, possibly a more dubious standpoint than Nicky Barnes’ good drugs.
What I am getting at here is not that selling KFC is morally bad, but that it is wrong to think that cynically selling a bad product well marketed, will succeed. McDonalds sell incredibly tasty food - it just happens to be bad for you. But when it comes to capitalism there is a responsibility not just to believe in a good product, but a product that is good for people. i.e. not tobacco or slave harvested cotton or heroin. The line moves. Kentucky Fried Chicken only becomes a moral hazard when it is too cheap and too delicious that people become habitual users.
Throughout Mr Untouchable, including in this trailer, people correct themselves after using terminology such as ’successful entrepreneur’. That this kind of language is used at all, smacks of a society as a whole, which needs moral regulation, not just banks on Wall street which have reward without risk.
This clip contains this unbelievable line: “he was giving something back to the community that he was abusing and killing”, wherever this line applies, unregulated capitalism has failed.
